A GROUP of scientists believes unabated quarrying and logging in the highlands of Luzon contribute to the flood disaster brought by Typhoon Vamco, locally known as Ulysses, recently.
The group opines that such activities in the Sierra Madre mountain range and other mountainous areas have degraded watersheds, making it a critical factor in the floods in the middle of this month, according to the Inquirer.net portal.
The Advocates of Science and Technology for the People (Agham) findings follows a rapid research, where it also concluded an excessive amount of rainfall made the situation worse, especially in Marikina City and in the provinces of Rizal and Cagayan.
Following the devastation caused by Vamco, the group urged the government to take urgent action to probe and put a stop to logging and quarrying activities.
"If a watershed is no longer healthy, when there are no trees and no vegetation, runoff water can easily travel down from the mountains and toward the rivers and other channels," Ana Celestial, Agham education and public information officer, said in an online forum.
Land conversion and urban expansion also play a role in the worsening state of the country's watersheds, she said.
"Water running off toward the urban areas are blocked by structures, as well as garbage," she said.
In northern Luzon, watersheds in the Cagayan River Basin are also threatened by mining and logging, said Agham secretary general Feny Cosico.
"Flooding is a natural phenomenon, but with anthropogenic or man-made factors, the hazards become much greater," Cosico said.
"Stop-gap solutions do not address coping capacity and rooted inequalities. Environmental and socioeconomic analyses must be incorporated in all of the governments' projects," she added
Such destructive activities persist despite the protected status of some of the watersheds, such as the Upper Marikina Watershed Protected Landscape, according to Agham in its report.
Three mining companies with mineral processing sharing agreements operate within the protected area in the towns of Baras and Tanay in Rizal province, it claimed.
Their permits were granted in the late 1990s, however, long before the Marikina river basin was declared a protected area in 2011.
Just outside the protected site, 10 quarries with a combined area of 50 hectares were reported to be operational, as of 2019, the group said.
Near Kasiglahan Village, a relocation site in Rodriguez, Rizal, which was heavily inundated during the height of Vamco, at least six quarries operate in San Isidro, just north of the residential area.
Also, Agham revealed more than 444,000 ha of forest land remain under legal commercial, private and community use "under different grants" issued by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.